Well, wouldn’t you know it. With one niggling exception, I’ve figured out my podcasting woes. Funny how bitching publicly about something is what enables you to figure out how to solve it. It’s almost embarrassing.

If you’d like to subscribe to either podcast, here you go. Paste these into your “Subscribe To Podcast…” box in iTunes. I believe there’s a better way to make these clickable but can’t remember how.

General music podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MuseworldPodcast

Piano Improvisations only:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MuseworldPianoMusings

I’m not saying that either of these are full of good music, but hey! We’re all friends here!

Well, I entered that most recent song I wrote into two contests. (You can hear the song by going to my MySpace page.) It didn’t make it into the final round of the local contest (the winner of my category ended up being someone who was on the board of the organization that sponsored the contest – I had heard his songs before and they are very, very good). It did make it into the second round of the international competition, though, and that was enough for me to feel pleased with myself.

So, I heard back today about which songs made the final round of the international competition, and here’s the list… and my name isn’t on it. So, OH well.

Overall a fun, successful experience though. The song is rough and the structure never struck me as quite right. I’ve said this before, I just think it breathes a little funny. But I do enjoy listening to it. So, on to the next musical project…

For those of you who know me and remember me taking my film scoring program, I finally finished the class review I’ve been working on for a while. For those who don’t know, I attended the film scoring program at The Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program, which is, I believe, the only film scoring program where you actually write a full orchestral film score and have it performed and recorded by a full orchestra, synced to the film. I kept a journal of my experience taking the class, and you can read it here.

By referring to my graphical rankings, I’ve come up with a Power Ranking of all 32 NFL Teams. I didn’t rank any team below another team it had unambiguously beaten. I had to make some subjective quality choices for the rest of the list, but I’ll detail them below.

As you you know from a couple of entries ago, I’ve gotten interested in figuring out ways to rank NFL teams. Just about every publication out there has a form of “NFL Power Rankings”. So far, they tend to be in two categories:

Completely Stats-Driven:Football Outsiders, also featured at Fox Sports, has a pretty cool system where they break everything down to the average performance per play, per position, per team, and then they adjust a team’s stats by who their opponent is. It’s really rather cool, and completely objective. But there are some things that bug me. For instance, Denver, at 5-1, is ranked 13th on their latest rankings, behind some teams at or below .500. In other words, a team that is capable of piling up the stats without winning can easily be ranked ahead of another team that doesn’t have great stats, but pulls out wins through gut, will, and exploiting matchups.

Completely Subjective: Seems like all the other power ranking lists out there are in this category. A sportswriter or a committee applies their subjective judgment to all the teams and ranks them however the hell they want. You’ll see huge changes in the lineup every week because of the upsets. The main flaw with these lists is that they aren’t scientific, have huge variance in week-to-week performance, and aren’t really reflective of the overall quality of a team.

Obviously, I like the scientific approach better, although all the lists are fun. But as I said, there’s that one thing about the Football Outsiders approach that bugs me. It doesn’t really pay attention to a team’s wins.

So, I’ve been attempting to devise a rankings system that pays attention to wins. And, since I’m just one guy with no access to actual nfl statistics and no ability to actually improve on Football Outsiders’ system, I’ve decided to create a vastly inferior system by only paying attention to wins.

There’s one rule: a team is ranked ahead of another team if it has unambiguously beaten them.

What do I mean by that? Well, that requires graphs. (And that’s really most of the reason I did this, so I could program in perl and play with this graph-generation package I have.) Read on for the graphs…

Gore had a recent speech that talked about the democratization of the press and how that doesn’t follow with the TV.

It got me thinking. How else could grassroots video production be expanded?

Video podcasting is pretty cool and all. But it’s still net only. If you had a public access television show that aired local podcasts, that could be cool… or if you had an open studio where people could come in and just release a statement or a rant or some three-minute piece of performance art, and know it would be aired, that would be cool. You could pair that with the net to vote on the best segments – the meritocracy of ideas – and then produce shows that would always display the “best-of”. Maybe have a network of public access shows in regional markets that are all of the same format. Maybe promote some up. May partner with a network show that is fueled by the most meritorious content from the public access markets. Like the next step of reality television, except actually…. real.

By the way – yes, I know that I’m describing something similar to Current TV. But Current isn’t on a major network, and it doesn’t solve the problem with there being a high bar for video production.